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Ball, Cheryl E. (2009, October 13). The aesthetics of editing digital media scholarship: A look at Kairos. Online Research Mediation & the Arts Seminar. Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Oslo, Norway.
abstract I will present a short history and overview of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, which has been publishing digital media texts since 1996. I will discuss how Kairos editors, board members, and authors negotiate the journal’s ever-changing boundaries between ‘typical’ print and ‘typical’ digital scholarship (in digital writing studies) as exemplified in the complicated relationship between aesthetics and rhetorics in a recent set of creative submissions, with an in-depth look at one submission in particular.
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Ball, Cheryl E., & Blair, Kristine. (2009, October 23). Publishing 2.0: New rules for new scholars. English Department, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM.
abstract In a shared speaker-series lecture, Ball & Blair discuss the state of digital scholarship, roles of peer-review and mentoring, issues in assessing and evaluating digital scholarship for tenure and promotion purposes, and ways to gain professional development through digital media for rising, junior, and senior scholars in English studies. After the talk, Ball & Blair met individually with graduate students for a two-hour Q&A session.
description A one-hour documentary film that interviews 22 rhetoric and composition specialists about the top issues in writing studies and the teaching of writing. This resource is freely available as a professional development resource through Bedford-St. Martin’s Press.
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McCorkle, Ben [Producer]. (2007, June 5). Visiting scholars in digital media: Cheryl Ball [Video]. Ohio State University. http://tinyurl.com/dmac-interview-ball
abstract
Short interview (12:29) with Cheryl Ball (Illinois State University), part of the ongoing series featuring Visiting Scholars in Digital Media and Composition at the OSU Department of English. Outline: I. On a digital tenure portfolio. II. Defining the terms in digital writing studies. III. Explaining this work to students. IV. Why I attend the DMAC institute. V. Advice for new multimedia teacher-scholars.
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Interviewed by Genevieve Critel. (2008, February). Documenting the process of building a digital tenure binder [Video]. Intro to Digital Media [course assignment]. Ohio State University.
description
This hour-long video, in which I was interviewed by Genevieve Critel for her Intro to Digital Media graduate class at OSU, discusses how and why I am preparing a digital tenure portfolio.
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by Doug Dangler. (2008, February). Digital media and digital scholarship [Podcast]. Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing: Ohio State University. http://cstw.osu.edu/podcasts/mp3/ball.mp3
description A 60-minute audio podcast interview by Doug Dangler (Associate Director for the Center of the Study of Teaching and Writing at OSU) about my work with digital media scholarship.
Screenshot from Inside Higher Education article where I am quoted
Interviewed for a news article about the Pew Internet and American Life report on “Writing, Technology, and Teens,” which includes statistics of student/teen use of social networking and texting as part of their writing lives.
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Interviewed by Fred Kemp & Rich Rice. (2008, September 5). What is multimodal composition? [Podcast]. Smarttcast. http://www.smarttcast.com/cheryl_ball.m4a
description This 60-minute audio interview, hosted by Drs. Fred Kemp and Rich Rice of Texas Tech University, contains a Q&A about multimodal composition.
description
Interviewed by renowned graphic designer and teacher, Ellen Lupton, on the role of design in first-year writing classes. Voice is the online newsletter of the professional association for design.
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Ball, Cheryl E. (2008, May 23). New media scholarship: Taxonomies, heuristics, and strategies to connect authors, editors, departments, and tenure committees. Computers and Writing, Athens, GA.
abstract
In this presentation, I draw on Allison Warner’s (2007) heuristic for assessing the scholarly value of traditional webtexts that fall between print-like and multimedia-rich, digital scholarship. Warner intentionally leaves room for other scholars to explore the ways that such a heuristic might be applicable (or flexible) for texts that incorporate multimedia elements, such as new media scholarship. The purpose of this presentation is to posit additional heuristics — and the complications of adding more heuristics — for emerging new media scholarly conventions that can be of use to tenure and promotion stakeholders.
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Ball, Cheryl E, & Blair, Kristine. (2008, April 2). Digital scholarship and the future of composition studies: A call to action. Research Network Forum, Conference on College Composition & Communication. New Orleans, LA.
abstract
The Research Network Forum (RNF) is a pre-conference all-day workshop for graduate students and junior scholars who are mentored on current research projects by senior scholars in the field of rhetoric and composition. During this shared plenary talk, Kris Blair (editor of Computers and Composition Online) spoke about professional development and Preparing Future Faculty in regards to the need to include digital media in graduate program curricula, including encouraging students to publish digital scholarship. I followed Blair and spoke about the current state of digital scholarship in the humanities, summing up with tips for graduate students, junior faculty, and senior faculty about publishing (and supporting the “counting” of) digital scholarship in their respective departments.
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Ball, Cheryl E. (2008, April 4). Peer-review in new media: The process of evaluation as example for tenure and promotion committees. Conference on College Composition & Communication, New Orleans, LA.
abstract
The MLA Report on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion (2006) renews the legitimacy gap between refereed print articles and refereed electronic articles, indicating that, “print articles count […] in 97.9% of departments, as compared with 46.8% for articles in electronic form.” The report notes, however, that electronic forms often don’t take into consideration new media forms of scholarship, such as the “innovative webtexts” published by several online journals in composition and rhetoric, and which James English (2005) wrote in the Journal of Scholarship Publishing as being an inconsequential form of scholarship. As the MLA Report suggests, the value of peer-reviewed digital publications might be greater if tenure committees knew how to read them, a problem that is heightened by the unfamiliarity of new media scholarship. To help, I examine a webtext to show how authors, editors, and review boards value a new media publication so as to provide an example for understanding scholarly innovation, which T&P committees can follow.
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Ball, Cheryl E. (2008, February 1). What’s the point of new media? Evaluating transitional, digital scholarship. English Department, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH.
abstract
Professor Ball will speak on “What’s the Point of New Media? Evaluating Transitional, Digital Scholarship.” In this presentation, she will address the recent MLA Task Force report, Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion (2006), which acknowledges an increasing need for thoughtful new strategies of evaluating digital scholarship in departments of English. Professor Ball will look at a contemporary heuristic (Warner, 2007) for reading and evaluating “webtexts” (texts that convey most of their meaning through text and hyperlinks) and compare them to “new media texts” that use multimodal elements to enact and convey meaning. This talk will be especially relevant for colleagues who might be involved in reading and evaluating new media texts during tenure and promotion cases. The presentation will be exploratory–just like the new media texts that it investigates–and discussion/interaction from the audience will be encouraged.
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Ball, Cheryl E. (2007, March 31). Composing from the underground: Combining academic and aesthetic practices in new media. Jacobson Symposium in Teaching with Technology. Creighton University, Omaha, NE.
abstract
In this keynote, I draw on Joe Marshall Hardin’s (2001) descriptions from Opening Spaces on English studies and aestheticism and the binaries between high and low art cultures, as represented by literature and composition studies. In speaking about aesthetic versus academic literacies, I discuss a sample new media text that a student produced (Robert Watkins’ “Words are the Ultimate Abstraction”) and show how new media production in our classes can bridge the gap between high and low literacies.
